PC Gaming may be taking a real leap forward if this turns out to be true.

A source said to have “knowledge” regarding an “unspoken API”, which is assumed to be DirectX 12, has spoken to Tom’s Hardware about the potential capacity for PC gaming that utilises GPU’s from both Nvidia GeForce and AMD Radeon.

Expected to launch alongside the upcoming Windows 10 operating system, DirectX 12 looks as though it may be leading the charge in the combo GPU field allowing users to make use of platform specific features such as AMD’s TrueAudio and FreeSync and Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software and 3D Vision. While this has strong merits for gaming on the PC, development for the optimization and distribution of these graphics resources is left up to developers. This means that the option is available should the developer wish to utilize it.

Whether or not the aforementioned “unspoken API” is in fact DirectX 12 is still in question, but given that it’s expected to be on the way and there’s been a lot of chatter about it’s gaming prowess, it’s a safe assumption to make. Still, you should take this with a grain of salt.

Yeah DX12 can do that but it would be complicated getting them both to talk to each other unless the API does it for the dev but mostly it will be same GPU’s plus i3/5/7 iGPU + APU’s boosting frames

d0x360

The api handles it all. All the discrete GPUs do is render what direct x tells them like render this half of the screen or this frame or these pixels. It will also allow each card to have unique data in memory unlike today where memory is cloned. That means 2 4 gig cards will mean 8 gigs of vram instead of just 4 gigs duplicated.

Could finally allow the true potential..the potential nvidia promised years ago to be unleashed. No more 5-10% gains in frame rate. We may now see 30-50% gains with each GPU added

Psionicinversion

30-50% gains would mean incredibly bad scaling and much worse than today. More like close to 100% gains or it’s not worth buying additional gpu’s or do you mean performance increase per generation??

If your talking per generation it still won’t happen as its down to how much power they increase the gpu’s by per generation and knowing NVIDIA they’ll use this to hold performance back per generation even more

With DX12 even with low level on multi gpu setups boosting frame rates 4K setups will get a pretty big performance bump for free but the “big gpu” mode will mean memory issues thing of the past.

d0x360

I mean performance increase per additional GPU in an sli or crossfire setup.
A 30-50% gain in frame rate per additional GPU would be amazing considering right now you are lucky if you get an extra 5-10%.

It could certainly be better than 30-50% but I’m thinking cautious here. Going from say 60fps to 90 by adding a GPU would be better than what we get right now.

d0x360

Excellent news. The part of this I’m most excited about it combining GPUs. For example using a cheap low end nvidia GPU to take advantage of nvidia GameWorks exclusive visual features (as seen in ac unity amongst many other games) and then using a beast from AMD to brute force the rest. Lately AMD cards have offered better top end performance but they are crippled by GameWorks and nvidia specific tweaks in games. Using an nvidia GPU for those things and then allow the ati GPU to work its magic would be awesome.

Hopefully such a thing will be possible. Even if it isn’t ill likely go AMD anyways. Another great thing will be when it comes time to upgrade your GPU. Today when you do that you sell or toss your old GPU because its useless in a multi GPU setup as the system runs at the level of the worst GPU. In this new setup your old GPU can just be set as slave to the new one and even if its only doing 20% of the total rendering workload…thats better performance. Or you could even dedicate a single GPU to physics tasks or whatever else a game or the api supports.

Exciting stuff in the pc space coming with windows 10.

Psionicinversion

Even though DX12 can do it doesnt mean nvidia will allow it in the drivers. At the minimum DX12 would just use the GPU to boost framerates but physx for example would most likely be disabled when an AMD GPU is detected in the system

Anyway have you seen the Toejam and Earl kickstarter? i backed it. the first one was so good and this one is true to that

At the same time, this is a much more interesting solution as it will allow legacy cards to still be used. If DX12 is supported by Southern and Northern Islands AMD cards as rumored (Or anything with GCN 1.0 it seems). Then those could be combined with the upcoming 300 series for even more performance.